Accountable Care

CMS has allocated $110 million in Affordable Care Act funding to 17 national, regional, or state hospital associations and health system organizations to continue efforts in reducing preventable hospital-acquired conditions and readmissions.

Use of analytics by large hospitals and health systems is on the rise, and should continue to grow -- although "perhaps not as dramatically or rapidly" as some might hope, according to a new Deloitte survey of CIOs and CMIOs.

Kyra Bobinet, MD, says a doctor can look at all the vital signs, test results, images and assorted assorted other EMR data and still have no idea how to treat a patient. "That's not real life," she says. "That's not how to care for people."

Kaiser Permanente engages 45 percent of its more than 9 million members through online portals, which offer EHR access and secure physician-patient email. But not all providers are able to demonstrate such healthy numbers.

Analytics firm Inovalon, which develops cloud-based intervention technology for payers, physicians and ACOs, will acquire Avalere Health, which provides advisory services and business intelligence tools to the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries.

Despite the many Medicare shared savings ACOs that cut enough of their spending in 2014 to merit financial incentives, the lion's share of them fell below the payment threshold, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced Tuesday.

By now, everyone's got an EMR. And most providers are also making use of ancillary technologies to help harness patient data toward more efficient care and better outcomes. But many species of health IT are still surprisingly underused in the U.S. hospital market.